Approval Junkie

Adventures in Caring Too Much

"In this hilarious collection of essays, comedian Faith Salie reflects on the absurd hoops she's jumped through in order to win approval. From running in place in a darkened shower in Africa at 4 am to lose weight, to agreeing to an exorcism at the behest of her crazy ex-husband, to eating pig organs with Harrison Ford's son after her producers told her it would "make good TV", Salie has done it all in the hopes of achieving positive reinforcement from colleagues, friends, and her aforementioned ex (or as she calls him, "was-band"). With thoughtfulness and sarcasm, Salie reflects on why it is she tries so hard to please others, highlighting a phenomenon that many people--especially women-- experience at home and in the work place. Equal parts laugh-out loud funny and poignant, Approval Junkie is a humorous exploration into why it is that we so desperately try to please others at the expense of our own happiness"--

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Another thing ladies and gentlemen alike tend to do to prove how well they're listening is to interject "That happened to me too!" and then launch into a tale of our own experience. It took me over a decade to stop telling people, upon learning that they had lost a loved one, "Yeah, my mom died when I was twenty-six." We think we're building a bridge of sharing, but, most of the time, we're really putting up scaffolding over someone else's story and clambering all over it.

An approval junkie knows, "You can please some of the people all of the time and you can please all of the people some of the time, but you'd have to spend an awful lot of time figuring out what pleases the people, which is time you could be spending on getting your candy striper uniform altered so it fits more flatteringly." I mean, just for example. Ultimately, an approval junkie desires most to please her toughest critic, which is herself.

I am an approval junkie. When I told people the name of the book I was writing, some immediately smiled and said, "Great title." No questions asked; they got it. A few looked concerned and said, "Really? I wouldn't have thought that of you." At which point I put down the cake I was frosting for them while simultaneously breastfeeding my daughter and doing squats and explained that I'm not ashamed about wanting approval. It kept my high school GPA very high. It's kept my BMI somewhat low. It's kept me on my toes when I wasn't already wearing heels to elongate my legs.